A Transformed Clark Institute From Tadao Ando And Annabelle Selldorf

For a much-anticipated museum expansion by a Pritzker Prize–winning Japanese architect, Tadao Ando’s design for a new wing of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, may appear surprisingly reserved. Standing just one story above grade, and hemmed in by monolithic concrete and red granite walls, it doesn’t reveal itself until you step inside. Pass through the entrance, however, and the building opens up with glass walls overlooking a three-tiered reflecting pool and long views to a rolling, bucolic landscape. Larger than it first seems, the building buries more galleries and a café underground, flooding them with natural light from above.

Ando, who completed the museum’s Stone Hill Center in 2008, is best known for quiet, minimalist buildings that exhibit an almost spiritual affection for concrete. "I was impressed by the 140-acre campus and landscape with rich natural beauty, surrounded by gentle hills, trees, and wetlands," he says, noting that he wanted his building to peacefully coexist with what was already there. "We have conceived a museum where art and nature can be simultaneously enjoyed, with expanses of glass and sweeping views as one moves between the gallery spaces."

An aerial rendering by Tadao Ando Architect & Associates.

Ando’s wing provides 11,000 square feet of new galleries. The Clark also hired New York architect Annabelle Selldorf to renovate its original 1955 white marble neoclassical building and the Manton Research Building, while landscape architecture firm Reed Hilderbrand reimagined the grounds. In addition, the museum has reinstalled its remarkable permanent collection—including notable works by French impressionists like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, and Edgar Degas, and American painters such as John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer—after years of loans to international museums. Long a destination for in-the-know art lovers searching for a mix of natural and artist-made beauty, the Clark is now more enticing than ever.